[bertil]

There are patterns and practices that make working remotely possible: document with context, clear pull requests, share your intent more deliberately, written stand-ups, give meetings detailed agendas, etc. Those are good habits when you share an office, but they can easily be complemented by sharing the same workspace and whiteboards.

Many teams had to discover those practices during the pandemic; companies that didn’t adopt them effectively likely lost a lot of people to frustration or apparent underperformance. After two years, many people have had the time to find places where those practices are understood and practiced, or at least have met people who know they can be.

The half that thought those were impossible or unlikely discovered it was possible, even enjoyable way of working.

There are still people, many of them my friends, who know and practice those deliberate communication patterns and who still prefer an office—–in particular for small start-ups. In some cases, those make more sense. But they are now a minority.

Other companies haven’t transitioned because they never really tried; many blamed the circumstances for the increasing disfunction of their teams, rather than learn and adapt. With some team members remaining remote, or contagious, unavailable, companies that have not adopted at least some learnings from the forced isolation can now seem very frustrating places to work. Fewer people are going to defend what they increasingly see as a suboptimal system.

I don’t think that the breakdown is as strict as you say. I think that many people have had the opportunity to see the benefits not of remote, but of a way of working that doesn’t rely on the crutch of an office. Some do it well, but a few still prefer the ease of interactions——a minority that typically don’t have time to comment here. Many haven’t learnt but won‘t comment either, because they don’t know what good should look like anymore.

[timr]

> Many teams had to discover those practices during the pandemic; companies that didn’t adopt them effectively likely lost a lot of people to frustration or apparent underperformance. After two years, many people have had the time to find places where those practices are understood and practiced, or at least have met people who know they can be.

I feel like the real story is something like this: a lot of people on HN are folks who have a highly introverted nature and work in jobs that demand extensive quiet time. Also, most are pontificating on the internet, but still haven't returned to the office. They have almost completely forgotten the velocity achievable when a team works together.

Can you overcome the limitations of remote work with better, more intentional documentation? Yes, to an extent. But my experience is that once you go back to working as a group, you'll re-discover that in-person communication has orders of magnitude more bandwidth. And if you have those best practices in place and work in an office together, you're even more efficient.

I don't hate remote work -- I do it myself, sometimes -- but nothing works as well as in-person communication. I forsee a future where most companies embrace a hybrid schedule, but demand in-person attendance on a regular basis.

[scarface74]

One man’s “collaboration” is another man’s constant interruption and having to deal with a loud open office.

[ipaddr]

Is there a need for a greater communication bandwidth? In person you get many additional signals but often your goal is to reduce these signals. Going into the office can be fun but you can have highly productive and close relationships remotely.

[timr]

Yes. Communication is the O(n^2) problem in group work. Everything else you do is limited by the efficiency of your communication.

[NeverFade]

> They have almost completely forgotten the velocity achievable when a team works together.

Your comment simply assumes that superior "velocity" to exist. Many of us have not seen it. For myself, and many of my fellow engineers in other companies, I found that I'm much more productive in remote settings. Our team's productivity objectively increased after we went remote. Conversations with colleagues shows this to be somewhat common in many other teams and companies.

Maybe your personal in-office experience has shown this fabled "velocity". For many of us it never existed, and instead we experienced constant low-value interruptions leading to inefficient loss of focus, lots of time spent "at work" but not actually working, instead socializing or wasting time in other ways that feel good.

[anaccountexists]

When you have to coordinate between AU, US, CA, and UK time zones and do 100% async communication to resolve conflicts during a project, getting everyone into the same physical space for a few days to work through issues saves so much time in the long run.

I don’t really care where I work, but I’ve come to strongly value travel / face time with my coworkers given that my team is fully distributed and Google Meet is just not the same as meeting someone face to face. For example, I ended up having a 5 hour rambling conversation about the history of our company with another coworker which suddenly shed a lot of light on why I wasn’t able to make progress pushing for certain org-wide changes. This would’ve never come up in a WFH context, since it’s “inefficient socializing,” but in the long run it’s going to help my communication skills a lot.

And the last thing: whenever I’m in the office, I get lots of interruptions, mostly from other ICs (I’m a tech lead). Although my personal progress slows down, I’ve noticed that my coworkers all move faster because they tend to be more likely to ask questions in person than scheduling meetings to pair. In person we tend to dive a bit deeper into the “why are we making this change” which helps people grow more than a direct answer to the “what”. To be honest, Slack and email are far worse distractions for me than the office ever is.

[Andys]

Theres truth here but it only really applies to people who have trouble doing effective group work over the Internet.

Other people seem to be wired differently.

[timr]

Maybe some people are better at it than others, but my core point is that most people are worse at it than they think they are. And for those who have the most limited work experience...well, they don't really have much of a comparison, do they? I'm not terribly surprised that they might claim they're uniquely qualified to do it...

In other words, remote work is a lot like multi-tasking. People swear that they're uniquely good at that, too, and insist that it's only the old farts who can't get with the new trends.

[huynhhacnguyen]

That setup sounds realistic, and I think the general idea is for the company (and other employees) to give employees what they want and recognize how they want to work. If someone prefers working at the office, it would be terrible to force them to WFH. However, it would also be unreasonable to force other people who enjoy working remotely to come to the office with them.

Regarding productivity, if someone does their best work at the office communicating with other people but prefers working at home, wouldn't they fall behind their colleagues when they opt for a WFH setup? And if they're still happy in that case, who are we to say they have to change the way they work? So let people realize that the decide for themselves instead of doing the reasoning and making decisions for them that they may not agree with.

Regarding social interaction, getting surrounded by other people at times is nice, since we're inherently social animals, but why would we utilize work to fill in that need? Getting isolated for an extended period of time would drive me insane, but getting surrounded by other people, who I may not be comfortable with, would also do the same to my mental health.

As for my case, I have found that people can disregard the practices we have developed in the WFH era since they can "communicate faster" now and that has been giving me lots of headaches lately. So when people say they are more efficient at the office, I automatically associate that with the tendency to ignore clear, coherent documents because people think they are "cumbersome".

[timr]

> I think the general idea is for the company (and other employees) to give employees what they want and recognize how they want to work. If someone prefers working at the office, it would be terrible to force them to WFH.

> Regarding productivity, if someone does their best work at the office communicating with other people but prefers working at home, wouldn't they fall behind their colleagues when they opt for a WFH setup?

Generally agreed, but caveats apply here: a lot of folks may prefer to work from home, but don't necessarily prefer the approach that leads to their greatest productivity. Also, most people don't properly account for intangibles, such as the creativity benefits of an environment where people spontaneously interact on a daily basis (it's famously the entire reason the Pixar studio building is designed as it is), or the mentorship of new people. Costs like this may be OK for a year, or three, but will eventually come back to bite you.

Finally, many people have reliably mis-aligned notions of what "productivity" is. For example, when a junior engineer disappears down a dark hole of code, it's usually a bad sign, even though they almost always think they're being very productive (I say this from deep personal experience, having fallen into this same trap many times over). The danger of this one is that even if you're evaluating by "outcome", nobody really knows if you're unproductive because you're drifting, or because you're distracted, or because of something else. And if you're far from the group, it's even harder to tell what might be wrong.

Remote work feels bad for junior employees, for exactly this reason. So many times in life you're stopped from going down a dark path not because of a meeting or a status update, but because you started chatting with the other people on your team over lunch, and found out that Bob had an idea the other day that would make your change ten times easier to implement, and Alice was refactoring some other bit of code that solves the bigger problem. And oh yeah: haven't you heard that the manager of the Chaos team is talking about eliminating that use-case anyway? Spending too much time there would be toxic for your career!

I haven't found a way to replicate this with zoom.

[huynhhacnguyen]

The point about junior employees is reasonable. In such cases, we may have to find ways to really mentor them, not just to evaluate their performance, so listening and understanding their struggles would be of utmost importance. During a 6-month period when we had to adopt a full WFH mode, I've had to conduct a dozen sessions like that, and had some promising results so far, so progress while small are made. In time, even though they may not be able to improve on all their shortcomings, they start to realize when they need to reach out to other experienced members of the team or when to raise their concerns. Anyway, the point of working remotely is not to eliminate communication but to filter out the necessary from the distracting ones. That being said, a team consisting of mostly freshers will surely fall apart in either a WFH or an office setup.

[fpig]

> Remote work feels bad for junior employees, for exactly this reason. So many times in life you're stopped from going down a dark path not because of a meeting or a status update, but because you started chatting with the other people on your team over lunch, and found out that Bob had an idea the other day that would make your change ten times easier to implement, and Alice was refactoring some other bit of code that solves the bigger problem.

This sounds like a lack of technical leadership. If the junior's boss is an engineer, and they do their job, then this won't happen. The story reminds me of my first job, which wasn't even remote, where my boss was a non-technical person and I was going down "dark paths" constantly because he couldn't recognize it as he lacked the expertise.

[ipaddr]

Stop using zoom to recreate the office.

Juniors aren't going down a darkhole. They are asking on expert forums and trying out different things. It's part of becoming senior. They don't need someone to rescue them.

People interact on a daily basis remotely. It's form is different but it matches the medium.

[mark_l_watson]

+1 good idea: written standups.

[21723]

+2 better idea: no standups.

[bamboozled]

We did written standups for about 2 months, they just died, everyone stopped doing them.

I think discipline is important, but I can also see how they must not have been adding enough value for them to remain a thing.

[ipaddr]

I love the idea.. daily is often too much or not enough. Blogs are written whenever something needs to be said.

[tomrod]

I prefer M-Th standups, hardstop at 15 minutes, with a weekly owner that rotates.

That way I can get quick heads up and plan to ask others for assistance, as needed. Get all the shouldertaps done quickly.

[sarchertech]

We've recently switched to written standups with threads organized by sprint goals. It's worked out fantastically so far.

[faitswulff]

Slack threads? I'd be interested to hear more about how this works on your team.

[sarchertech]

Yes every morning someone posts a comment for each sprint goal, and people post updates in the comment threads.

It would be nice if we had bot to automate posting the original comments, but we haven’t got around to that yet.

[faitswulff]

This sounds like it might work nicely with zulip's topics feature (explained in the carousel on the homepage: https://zulip.com/)